CDP Institute

Meta faces a fine of 800 million euros (about $840 million) after E.U. regulators found it in breach of competition law by exposing Facebook Marketplace to millions of users in its wider social networks. The E.U. seeks to prevent businesses with dominance in one area (like social media) to use it to gain dominance in another area (in this case shopping). This comes as India levies a modest $24.5 million fine over WhatsApp data sharing.

CDPs and analytics tools tie (37%) for the most essential components of the martech stack in a survey of 625 marketing leaders by digital experience platform Sitecore. Many other stack tools, however, were getting lower scores for delivering excellence, with DX tools at the bottom of the list (only 22%). Improbably, another data point showed 48% of those surveyed listed security as the number one consideration when choosing DX tools.

A survey of over 600 marketing operations professionals shows digital maturity growing slowly, with 50% saying automation is not fully integrated. Only 7% report fully integrated channels and lifecycle personalization capabilities. Still, 85% of companies surveyed do have dedicated marketing ops teams (or person at least).

While the U.S. Federal Election Commission is famously toothless in its attempts to enforce standards for political advertising, agencies elsewhere have considerable bite. In response to disclosure rules aimed at avoiding election interference and deception, Google has announced it will stop serving political ads in the European Union starting next year. It had already dropped political ads in Canada, France, and Brazil.

In tacit acknowledgement that low-price Asian marketplaces like Temu and Shein present a competitive challenge, Amazon is launching Haul, an ultra-low price section of its ecommerce site. Haul, featuring fashion, home, lifestyle, electronics, etc, will price products at $20 or under, likely sourced from China. Downside: longer delivery times.

Rather than AI taking jobs away, it looks like marketers will need AI skills to get jobs. Ninety-four percent of marketing leaders say AI skills will be critical in next year’s hiring decisions, according to a report from Invoca. At least 90% will invest more in AI next year, will have budget allocations for AI and expect AI to have a positive impact on their organizations.

Perplexity AI will begin serving ads alongside clearly marked “sponsored” follow-up questions. Whole Foods Market and PMG are among the initial advertising partners. Not only will brands not influence responses to initial questions, the sponsored follow-up questions will also be answered using Perplexity’s regular AI technology.

Speaking of new ad channels, it was only a matter of time until Meta began serving ads on its Threads platform. It will happen early next year, according to reports in The Information. Threads recently hit 275 million monthly users.

Audience platform Alliant has been acquired by private equity firm Inverness Graham. Alliant offers marketers custom audience segments based on data sources including proprietary transactional data. It will continue to operate as an independent company.

Leading French news organizations including Le Monde and Le Figaro have brought a lawsuit against X for infringing “neighboring rights,” a European extension to the traditional concept of copyright. A Paris tribunal issued an order in May instructing X to provide commercial data so that the news organizations could assess the income X earned from their content. X has not yet complied.

Revenue intelligence and demand gen company DemandScience has merged with ABM platform Terminus to create a new company that will operate under the DemandScience name. The move will combine global revenue marketing capabilities with “account-based experience” marketing. ABX by DemandScience will launch as a platform to bring together ABM and syndication activation with cross-channel reporting.

AI-powered marketing platform Jasper has unveiled an AI knowledge layer designed specifically for marketing and based on Jasper’s BrandIQ and MarketingIQ solutions. BrandIQ is a no-code and API based solution to bring brand guidelines into an AI model for text and image creation. MarketingIQ brings knowledge, information and best practices to the LLM.